


Technicolor Dreams

by flammable_heart



Series: CROWNED WITH TEETH [2]
Category: British Actor RPF, Loki: Agent of Asgard, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Actor Tom Hiddleston, Angst, Dreamsharing, Explicit Language, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Good Loki (Marvel), Male-Female Friendship, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28340094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flammable_heart/pseuds/flammable_heart
Summary: The reader invades Loki's dreams literally and figuratively.
Relationships: Loki (Marvel) & Reader, Loki (Marvel)/Original Character(s), Loki (Marvel)/Original Character(s)/Reader, Loki (Marvel)/Original Female Character(s), Loki (Marvel)/Reader, Loki/OFC, Loki/Thor (Marvel), Tom Hiddleston/Loki/Reader, Tom Hiddleston/Original Female Character(s)
Series: CROWNED WITH TEETH [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088579
Kudos: 13





	Technicolor Dreams

She opens her eyes to flowers. The setting sun of her imagination paints a night sky blue, a thousands stars dotting the horizon. It's beautiful the way her dreams are logical, and so she knows this doesn't belong to her.

(But she's walked this path before.)

The path bends beneath her feet, the technicolor landscape bending to her will. She steps into the darkness, one foot after the other. Quick, quick, quick. It's as simple as closing her eyes. She slips into dreams as if this was what she was born to do; into Loki's dreams like they were tailor made for her. She feels like a thief, a wraith, a pain in the ass.

Her dreams are mathematical in function, sleek in form. But Loki—

The girl wonders if she brings the flowers with her or if they're all his own.

He drinks, and there are nights when his dreams waver, sluggish graphite lines drawn with trembling fingers. Nothing stays, slips through his fingers like sand, the sun a jagged slice of glass in the rough hewn sky.

But tonight there are flowers.

He saw them once, in a different landscape on another coast. He saw them when she was too far to reach him. They must have reminded him of her—a quiet beauty, vibrant, but not enough to blind you. Val is the blinding one. This girl though, she glows like the moon.

There's no reaching to create anymore; he can sit on his little hill, the sun littering his face with new freckles that he'll carry home with him, and breathe life into a world that already has a life of its own. He can feel it pulsing under his fingerprints, and he can feel her when she breaches the gap.

She dreams petals twisting in the summer breeze as she climbs the invented hillside that separates them with a song whistling in the wind. "Are you dream stalking me?" she calls in time with her footsteps. “Or—I guess—is it the other way around?”

It's always been that way—the girl with night sky eyes, a ghost in his dreams, a raven in real life. And he hears her before he can even see her shock of wavy hair, his eyes instinctively raised to the sky, the sun hanging halfway between the heavens and the horizon, bleeding red across the landscape. There are words seeping slowly from his chest that he cannot give voice to and he closes his eyes against the fading warmth.

"You've always been the intruder. I chase you, remember?" His eyes meet hers only as he speaks the last word, a hint of that boyish mischief she'd met all those years ago.

She dreams logic. She dreams equations into life. Loki's dreams are soft lines, blurred edges. They’re the things she grasps for but can never quite have. Their differences are more evident here than in the waking world, where she can ignore the hard edges. Here, it's written in the sky.

She is the tides of the ocean, balance and reason.

(But he is an autumn breeze.)

"That's awfully poetic," she replies readily breaching the hill to see him laying in the fading sun. A marble statue brought to life. Sun glinting off his honey soaked skin, and she watches him for just a moment before trudging forward again, ignoring that pang in her chest that says something like ‘this isn't going to work out for you’.

Because why should it?

Their differences are painted across the sky—night and day fighting for rank amongst the clouds. A perfect illustration of why she shouldn't be here. Even their subconscious’ were are war. And yet—

She's happy they're alone.

Or is she worried? Something like anxiety creeps into her chest, but she pushes forward and drops herself into the kitten soft grass beside him.

_Mistake. Mistake. Mistake._ "And anyway intruder seems like a strong word. Since I've got the key and all.” She says it as nonchalantly as possible, but she knows she never misses a beat.

He thinks of her like the moon—far away she keeps them in order, controls the tides, lights their starry skies. But when she gets too close she’s dangerous; tidal waves crash against the walls of his chest and he can’t help thinking that she has a gravitational pull all her own.

People think they orbit him, but the truth is he’s been caught in her orbit for years.

His dreams are like the words he writes when he’s bright—they’re beautiful, but they don’t hold much sway. He could bring a flower home with him, but what good would it do? She likes concrete things, real things and he’d paint a dreamscape just for her, but he can’t because he craves a softness the real world has never offered him.

She could be soft too, if she let herself; he could teach her, if he wasn’t so goddamned scared.

He breathes a laugh out of his nose, a smile touching just the edges of his mouth as he lays still, the sky fading into the beginnings of a bruise, the branches above them shaking, a single petal from a poor flower coming to bed down on his chest without his notice. Hand on his temple, elbow in the dirt, he rolls onto his side as she settles herself.

_I’ve got the key._

His eyes linger for a second too long as he looks at her, that tired ache in his chest a reminder that this isn’t real. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m losing my touch.” He means with words, because it seems any time she’s around they get caught in his throat, twisted up and spit out the wrong way.

She's seen it.

That far off look in his eyes. The boy (no man? The distinction feels hard to make when she's always looking. Was Loki a man? Was she a woman? She still felt small and insignificant, like he'd left her behind while she was leaving him)—that dreamt of a little more life breathed into his bones.

She's seen something else too. A hint of more when he thinks she's not looking. When through the miracle of modern magic she'd seen his face in blocky pixels on a screen in the palm of her hand and just for a moment they were happy. Or when they'd ducked down an alleyway to avoid being caught on camera, pressed close enough to hear each other's heartbeats.

But memory is a fickle thing, easily rewritten to reflect the truths that she knows.

She knows what she knows—that the tell-tale ache in her chest says ‘we're not good for each other’. Even now, settled sweetly into the grass beside him, she knows that this—anxiety prickling at the calm she’s willed into existence—is not them. That any moment they'll erupt like gasoline on a fire and she will say things she does not mean so the distance remains in tact.

She can rewrite their history, marking out the portions that say ‘I could have loved you’ with heavy lines.

"Well, everyone needs an editor. Lucky for you, I'm very good with a red pen.”

There's something more, and he knows it. He’s always known that New York is a place people come to die—they let their bones settle here and they wait.

_And wait._

When you get out of here, you do not come back. And he had thought once, of leaving, but there were things, people, holding him here, that he could not leave behind. It’s still a fresh scab, her leaving; something that won’t scar over because he keeps picking at it when he knows he should just let it be. She should have stayed gone.

He might have died if she had.

And here, now, looking at her with his sick sad eyes, her hair so red from the stupid sky, he wishes he’d said something before she’d left. But she hadn't given him the chance—had fled as soon as she could for something better. There’s always something better.

What if better is the two of them telling the truth, instead of lying to themselves and each other?

And he doesn’t look away at this thought, but he doesn’t know how to tell her. There isn’t a way to do it gently, he can’t really touch her and he knows that if the words ever did find their way out of the cavern of his chest, they’d seem hollow after all this time. There are too many people between them—all the girls and boys he’s slept with, and the boy she left behind from her other life.

He laughs again when she speaks, a feral, almost hurtful thing that springs from a place inside of him that he doesn’t like. “A red pen? More like a knife. Go ahead darling, cut me open. Bleed me dry.” He lets himself fall onto his back, looks expectantly up at a sky that suddenly has stars starting to peek from behind thin, high clouds.

God he would willingly let her cut him open if it meant freeing that heaviness in his chest. He touches her knee by accident, fingers finding a tiny hole to worry at, eyes focused on that when he turns his head to look at her again.

His laugh cuts her in a way she can't describe. A knife to the chest. A punch in the gut. She wants to say something comforting, something to ease the pain behind his eyes. Instead, she says, "You're such a drama queen," and shoves him a little, nudging him gently with her shoulder. Because this was the thing: maybe she could have loved him—maybe she did—but it felt less important than what they already had. These checks and balances, these quiet moments. His hand on her knee, her shoulder pressed against his. The subtle uptick in her heartbeat when he touches her so nonchalantly.

There were no beautiful words to describe what this is besides: he is everything to her.

For all the words flung like stones against glass, she could not stand the idea of being without him. She has never been the risk taker—that was for braver souls than hers. Everything she did was careful and analytical, clinical to a fault. There were rules to be followed, a formula laid out in the stars. This—whatever it was that hung between them (and she pretends like she doesn't know because it’s safer, easier, less tortuous)—is strays from the path. This threatens their very existence.

It’s pathetic.

Maybe she’s pathetic.

But she doesn't like to lose.

She shifts, rolling onto her side, knees pulled toward her chest, arms tucked neatly under her head. They were no longer touching but this somehow feels more intimate because he’s looking at her and she’s looking at him and the turbulent sound of her heart pounding in her ears as if in warning.

A fool girl doing fool things.

There's a joke forming on the back of her tongue, something to ease the tension, to allow the building lighting to crackle against their tenuous night sky, but something in his face stops her.

"Are you okay Loki?”

How was he supposed to know that she was a universe?

Young Loki, silly boy with scraps of paper pressed between his mattress and box spring—he couldn’t see her for what she was. Matt was right, he was a little boy pulling pigtails of the girl he liked. He’d been doing it for years, and somehow, they'd gotten here. A place where she could call him a drama queen and he could laugh it off like it was nothing.

But still his chest aches for the things they do not say, for the careful way he touches her and the way she thinks it’s nothing.

With her he does not feel like a god; with her he knows he is a child, or a monster. And after all these years she can look right through him and see him for exactly what he is.

Why hasn’t she left?

Everyone does, save for Matt and Val. He—the boy built from fire and ash, the boy made to leave, wonders why everyone leaves him. He knows it’s because he’s unworthy, because he’s an angry piece of shit that the stars spat out; something rejected and burning too bright, threatening to explode at any moment.

He ruins everything he touches, and that is why he does not touch her.

And he feels adrift in the galaxy of her eyes as they look at one another, seeing only what they want, not what really is. ‘I’m fine.’ lingers heavy in the back of his throat, an easy escape from a question that is harder to answer. “D’you ever think about running away?” They are not too old for these games, to imagine a life outside of this tomb of a town where their parents and grandparents came to die.

It’s more than a question about what she dreams about when he's not there. Behind those stormy sea eyes is something that says, ‘don’t leave me behind’.

She asks if he’s okay and he dodges. Artful and elegant, this is the Loki she knows. Never a straight answer, his whole world is shaped in metaphors and poetry. Maybe that’s answer enough. Maybe hard truths aren’t everything when their whole world is spun from gilded half-truths and empty promises. He asks about running away, nonchalant, but this world hangs in the balance.

Nonchalant, but she knows to tread carefully.

Because she left once—a fact he won’t let her forget, a sacrilegious ‘what if’ that looms over their heads. But she’d left once and it hadn’t worked and she’d returned bruised and bloody, a world away from who she’d been when she was sixteen and the world felt malleable and understandable and hers; or maybe even _theirs_.

He asks about running away, and it all comes down to this—she’s scared. Scared of her past following her everywhere she goes, eyes swollen shut from crying herself to sleep, scared of her future crumbling before she takes another step. Maybe she’s frozen in place. Maybe everything she’d once wanted feels less important now that the world seems rigid and unforgiving. 

”No,” she whispers, safe and sound in this tumultuous universe. Her whole life seems contingent on other’s choices. And the words are out of her mouth before she can think better of them, a deluge in two simple words: “Do you?”

He wonders what might have happened if she hadn't left, if he’d had time to figure out the right words to tell her—

To tell her that the ache in his bones isn’t from the fire anymore, that is isn’t to run away and find some place where no one knows all the tragedy he was born from. No, the ache is something different now. It’s his heart beating too fast any time he sees her and it’s his blood running so hot he can never cool down, and it’s _her_.

He says them sometimes when he’s alone—words he couldn't figure out how to say to his mother before she died, names that get caught in his throat and then lost in the void. He knows he needs to relearn lessons in tenderness, that his nails dig too deep into skin that begs for softness. But he does not know what these words mean anymore. He needs someone to show him how.

Most of what they say is not ever spoken in words, but in silences—in the way they avoid questions and eye contact, in the way his teeth graze his lower lip before he reaches out to pick up a petal that’s fallen onto her arm. He blinks for too long when she admits that she doesn’t think about leaving anymore, because he wants to believe it’s the truth. But his heart has a hard time holding onto that, when she left once before, when everything about her screams that she does not belong in a town like theirs.

“No.” He means it, even though it feels like a lie, with the echoes of running ingrained in his bones. “I’m tired of leaving.” And in his weary eyes is the truth—that he just wants a place to come home to that doesn’t feel like a prison, that he wants to stop keeping his brother at a distance, wants to stop keeping her at a distance.

“What do you want?” He asks it without thinking, shifting silently to lay on his stomach, arms bent beneath his head, eyes still looking perilously deep into her’s. And he’s sure that if she listens closely enough, she’ll be able to hear the rush in his ears of his heart beating so goddamned fast that he can barely breathe.

She wonders too, what life would have been like if she stayed. If this—Loki lying on his stomach, eyes pinning her in place, her curved towards him on her side. The mere inches left between them feel like miles. If she'd stayed, would it still be like this?

If she'd stayed, would she have stayed for long?

No, because naive or stupid, she would have run headlong into eventually.

She'll always come back—this place has it's own magnetic field and their lives seem to revolve around its center.

And home is nothing like a noisy city, but it’s a lot like the boy lying beside her.

She hums her response, skeptical and wary. He says he’s tired of leaving, and she doesn't know what to think. Tired of leaving, and she thinks of Thor alone with a beer at his kitchen table. She thinks of Matt buzzing all their phones asking where Loki is. Of Val and Tony and every stranger that's ever crossed his path because everyone knows that Loki Odinson is made of electricity and frenetic energy and that sort of thing can't stay still for long.

She hums her response because she can't think of anything else to say.

His question is a loaded gun and there's nothing to protect her from the impact. What did she want? The future felt burdensome and unreal. All her hopes and dreams were packed away in the boxes she'd brought back from Boston. "I don't know what I want," she says slowly, truthfully, burying her nose in her elbow just for a reason to break his impactful gaze. The sky seems to quiver with some sort of unused lightning. They’ll have to wake up soon. "A dog, maybe."

There is a place and time in which there is no space between them.

Loki will never know what this feels like, but he’s dreamt about it. He knows, without really knowing, that a universe exists where they have kissed, where he has told her that he loves her.

Her chest vibrates and the sky trembles, his nerves raw with expectations that always go unanswered. He is a faulty thing, strung together on contradictions and lies, built to run but longing to stay. And she does not believe the words that he so desperately wants to be true.

(For her he would stay.)

She is the only thing that can calm the howling in his chest, but she won’t.

And he knows he doesn’t deserve it, but even vicious, wild things long for secret gods when they think no one is watching.

He wants her to say that she wants him, needs her to say that she needs him, but she won’t. And he in turn—frail, dream boy that he is—cannot admit these things either. They are, for better or worse, caught in a holding pattern that has shaved years off of something that could have been.

(Something that is likely never to be.)

She breaks their gaze and he closes his eyes tightly as she speaks again. “A dog?” He almost sounds wounded beneath the acid that coats every word. And with arms that suddenly look like they might snap under his weight, he pushes himself up off the ground, whatever softness he’d been leaking from that bad, purple heart of his, stopped.

He shakes his head as he walks over to the tree, bracing himself with one hand against it, eyes on the shivering sky. There’s nothing else to say—they’ll wake up and pretend like he never touched her, because that’s the way it has to be. And he glances over his shoulder at her, hair like the fire that lives in his bones—

_girl with night sky eyes._

And just like that he’s gone.

Volatile, she watches him go. Candle in the fucking wind.

She hadn’t asked for this—the broadening of her heart, the expanding definition of _this_. Shelonged for simple and uncomplicated, when they were teenagers and they could lay side by side in the grass and not think ‘what if’. When the electricity crackling through their shared sky still meant possibility and not some ominous and foreboding.

She laid there, nose buried in her elbow, and watched him—his body wound tight enough to snap.

(Her heart ached.

This was her fault too.)

She reaches out to touch him before she even realizes it, the world bending to her will without either of their consent; the astral plane drawing them together without thought or context. The world folding like paper until she wraps her arms around his waist and buries her nose in his shirt, little fingers curled into the thin fabric. It’s funny how real this feels. The pressed cotton feels the same here as it feels anywhere, but this moment feels categorically unreal, as if they are both spun out of the stuff of dreams and any moment she’ll wake up and this will never have happened.

“Loki—”

He doesn't remember the last time he heard her say his name like that, and his nails break against the cracked bark of the tree, his chin digging into his chest as their separate universes collide.

When she touches him he feels like he could collapse, all the strength in his too tightly wound muscles suddenly gone. He does not realize his eyes are closed until he opens them, sees her arms wrapped around his middle, the pit in his stomach deepening to a fucking black hole.

“Hmm—” He means to say her name, but all he can manage is a vibration, deep in his chest that has them both shaking.

This isn’t what she wants, but her resolve is weak. He is what she wants, but did that make her a fool? She is a lot of things but reckless isn't one of them. And Loki—isn’t that what he lived for? He'd built a life on rushing headfirst into things, pushing past boundaries as if they didn't matter.

Sometimes, she wished she could be that way.

(They'd only end up broken; more beaten down than before. But failure meant room to grow.)

Her fingers tighten in his shirt, little hands needling for his attention as she looks up at him with doe eyes, cheek still pressed to his chest.

“Don't be mad, okay?”

He’s a wreck in her arms; poor little boy with an ache in his chest that he cannot place.

“I’m not mad at you.” He presses the words into her hair, draws fingers that are too careful to be his down her arm. “I’m just—” He looks up at the sky, searching for an answer that won’t make itself visible, even as that familiar electricity crackles above them.

“Why is it like this?” He looks at her, head tilted slightly, a thumb brushing across her cheek. He knows it’s his fault—the way they are a product of his inability to let anyone get close. But here she is, pressed against him, even though he knows she’ll be gone when he wakes up.

He wonders why, of all the people in his life, she is the one who manages to breach the wall he’s built around his heart. Even Val cannot scale it, and certainly Matt had tried and failed to be the one to chisel a hole through. But _her_ , she didn’t even have to try—there has always been a weak spot in its foundation for her.

There’s always been a weak spot in him for her.

And he would kiss her if he thought it could make things better, but he knows it only makes things worse. It only makes people pine for things they cannot have. It only breaks hearts that are already cracked and leaking.

Lightning snaps through her as his fingers leave invisible marks on her arms. It paints itself against the sky and she fears for an instant that she’s going to wake up and none of this will have happened. That this is just a dream within a dream, a world crafted by a girl’s vivid imagination. Her heart is a rocket ready to take flight, and pressed against him, she can hear his too, the rapid thump thump thumping that reminds her that they were twisted out of stardust, drops in the night sky spun by magic, but this is real, that this is happening, that warm and smoldering, Loki is nearly still in her arms.

She holds him a little tighter, afraid that if she lets go, he’ll break away again.

Afraid if she lets go he’ll break.

She has always been a girl who fixes broken things, a benevolent inventor. A dreamer of worlds, an inventor of unexpected creations. She fuses metals and mends wires; she makes things whole again. But Loki Odinson is not a thing meant to be fixed. He is a boy, a beast, a creature of his own making. There is nothing she can do for him.

“I don’t know why it’s like this,” she says, her mantra, her theme. She isn’t the type of girl to cry, a theory Loki proved again and again, but she can feel the lump building in her throat, a desperate pit in her stomach.

That gentle look in his eyes: fleeting, miserable. A look veiled from everyone but her. She thinks he might kiss her but there are rules, a laundry list of why he shouldn’t and why he can’t and why she doesn’t want him to anyway.

What did they matter?

“It doesn’t have to be.”

Her heart is already broken anyway.


End file.
